How ’60s Starlet Joey Heatherton’s Hollywood Career Was Derailed by Scandal

Upon the release of her 1965 film, My Blood Runs Cold, Joey Heatherton appeared to have finally made it as a bona fide movie star.

Writing for her blog, The Motion Pictures, film critic Lindsey D. said this about Heatherton and her costar Troy Donahue, “the two leads … are attractive. They make an appealing pair, and perhaps that’s all you need for a stylish thriller such as this.”

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Although Heatherton loved making movies, her greatest talent has always been her voice, which is both delicate and powerful when it needs to be. Even before breaking into film, she would make appearances on various television variety shows like Hullabaloo, Hollywood Palace, The Dean Martin Show, and The Kraft Music Hall with Perry Como. As her movie career began to take off, Heatherton still found time to appear in those shows and others like them.

However, as the tumultuous decade that was the ’60s wound down, disaster arrived on her doorstep in the form of her relationship with Lance Rentzel, who, at the time, was a standout wide receiver playing for the Dallas Cowboys.

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Upon meeting Rentzel, Heatherton fell head over heels in love. And while she made sporadic television appearances during this time, it does seem like she deliberately put her career on the back burner so that she could focus on her relationship with Rentzel. The two would eventually tie the knot in 1969.

Reviewing Rentzel’s autobiography for The Harvard Crimson, journalist J.R. Eggert reported that the athlete said that Heatherton “seemed to have everything I wanted in a woman – sincerity, intelligence, talent, glamour, and incredible beauty.”

In addition to being a phenomenal athlete, Rentzel was a full-throttle kind of guy. He loved to make a big splash wherever he went, and having the beautiful and sexy Heatherton by his side, well, that was about as big a splash as one could get back then. But Rentzel also appeared to have a few demons in his back pocket.

About a year and a half after the two married, Rentzel was charged with indecent exposure to a minor. Initially, Heatherton did her best to stand by her man. However, as the press looked into Rentzel’s history, they discovered a similar incident that had happened a few years earlier, before he had met Heatherton.

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That revelation was too much to take, and in the fall of 1971, Heatherton petitioned the courts for divorce. And, by doing so, she was finally able to once again focus on revitalizing her career.

Getting back into music was easy. Being an accomplished dancer as well as singer, Heatherton found herself on top of Vegas marquees with the likes of Tony Bennett. And audiences loved her. It was clear that they were willing to put the past aside and let Heatherton share her wonderful talents.

While she was building her career, she had often accompanied Bob Hope on his much-celebrated USO tours, and Heatherton continued to do that as well.

And then there were those Serta Perfect Sleeper commercials. Let’s just say her appearances were extremely memorable, to say the very least. If you’re curious, you can watch a short film on the making of those commercials on YouTube.

All told, post-divorce, things seemed to be going fairly well in terms of Heatherton’s career in TV and music. But movies? Well, that was a different story.

Bluebeard with Richard Burton. Credit: Everett Collection

Heatherton appeared in the 1972 Richard Burton bomb Bluebeard. It is possible that the making of that movie occurred either right before Rentzel’s criminal charges or during that horribly stressful time. Either way, Bluebeard would be Heatherton’s last feature film for five years, and when she did finally return to the big screen, it was in a film called The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington.

During the ’80s, Heatherton leaned heavily on her music career, whether it was guest appearances on TV variety shows or her cabaret-style Vegas show.

In 1990, director John Waters hired Heatherton for a role in his movie Cry-Baby. But that was pretty much it. For the most part, film and television roles had dried up. The offers just weren’t coming in. So, in 1997, Heatherton decided to try to revitalize her career with a pictorial in Playboy magazine. Truthfully, this particular tactic rarely seems to work for those celebrities who choose to employ it.

In the end, Heatherton’s Hollywood dreams were undeniably derailed by her ex-husband’s choices. Yet, despite the premature end of her feature film career, Heatherton’s undeniable beauty, vibrant energy, and genuine talent allowed her to carve out her own space in American pop culture. The movies may have missed out on what she had to offer, but audiences everywhere else were lucky to have her.